Sunday, March 6, 2011

A Ball Masque

Recently, we worked on contributing part of the decor for

a Ball Masque. The guests were very much into the mood and most wore carefully chosen and created masks- so fun to see! With Fat Tuesday just around the corner, I thought now would be the perfect time to share our masks and decor with you.

Our assignment was to design and create six

5' x 7 ' masks for placement around the periphery of the room. We also designed the entrance to the room, through which the guests walked between cocktails and dinner.

Come with me behind the scenes...

The first step was to design the faces. Hunter Elliott, a regular contributing artist at Pieter Bouterse Studio, took on the task and created the six beautiful mask sketches. They then needed to be enlarged and transferred to their canvases. Here is one face being projected onto two 4' x 8 ' sheets of plywood.

Following that, the muslin was glued onto the shaped plywood and coated with a layer of primer.

Here's part of the group in the middle of the process...

Here you can get an idea of just how big they were! Many, many hours were spent applying the numerous layers it took to take them from a blank canvas to a detailed face.

For the entrance walk through, we morphed a double-sided face mask we had taken a photo of in Venice and had it printed on canvas. We glued it to the custom frame and attempted to "mend" it as it had come in three parts and one seam was rather feisty. Since the color was not as desirable as we had hoped, we needed to re-paint the face.

Here it is in place before its special mood lighting was turned on and focused. Of course, I missed that photo(!).

Here are the rest of the masks.

The evening was magical. Lots of candlelight and flowers and fruit topped the velvet runners.

The tall candlesticks were wood reproductions with 22K gold accents. Lower silver candlesticks, silver-flecked votives and pewter containers were also combined on the tabletops.

There is nothing like Mardi Gras season to put one into a festive mood, especially in the middle of a snowy winter that most of us have had!